Assessing the Potential Impacts of Free Trade on Land Use

Imagine a Florida without fresh Florida oranges or fresh Florida orange juice. Now imagine that same Florida with even more massive cities spreading up the southeast coast into central Florida, across to the west coast up into the Big Bend, and along the Panhandle hugging the Gulf. And worse, imagine thousands of Florida's agricultural farmers and workers unemployed, the leftovers of an industry that cannot compete with a global oligopoly. A reduction in an import tariff of Brazilian citrus could produce this horrendous scenario. Land use planning would be crucial under a very dramatic shift in the production of citrus within the state. This paper seeks to inform the research community of a highly possible threat to Florida's citrus industry, and eventually to land planning. This paper will discuss the current goal of the Free Trade Area of the America's trade union between the countries of the Western Hemisphere. The paper describes how that agreement could adversely impact land values. By inferring the effect that trade liberalization would have on land values, a scenario of land use change is depicted. By representing the citrus industry spatially as it is today, utilizing Geographic Information Systems (GIS) combined with observed data, a description of how citrus might look in the future is discussed. This analysis is completed for the thirty-two citrus producing counties. The analysis uses data from 1992 and 2002 to construct a temporal analysis of the citrus industry. Land use planning in the State of Florida is a powerful tool for growth management Land planning for a local government is often solely based on characteristics of a community and its neighboring communities. There is generally little discourse on international economics/politics when local land planning occurs. This paper pushes land-use planners to dig deeper when assembling information about the characteristics of a community and to explore, holistically, possible factors that could produce sweeping changes to the entire state.